Brahma and Vishnu went to see Shiva. As it happened, the guard was fast asleep, so they entered in without asking any permission, and Shiva was making love to his wife, Parvati. He was so passionately into it, so drunk! – he may have taken some drug, because he is perfectly well known to have used drugs. Marijuana and hash and opium were all known to him.

He continued to make love and these two gods stood there watching. Great gods! They could not even say, “Excuse us,” and get out. They must have enjoyed the scene – living pornography! Six hours it continued, the love-making, and these two gods stood there for six hours watching. A long blue film! – and nothing else, just making love! No other incidents, nothing else…just Shiva making love to his wife. But they were very angry.

When Shiva was finished they told him, “We have been waiting for six hours and you have not even taken any notice of us. We are very angry and we curse you that you will be remembered forever and forever by your sexual organs.”

That’s why in the Shiva temple you see the phallic symbol: Shiva is remembered by his sexual organ.

Now, these Hindus must have been very indulgent. Their gods, too, were very indulgent. But then came a reaction, the pendulum moved. Buddhism and Jainism rebelled against this indulgence and they created a very repressive world, a repressive morality.

India still lives under that influence, but it is moving slowly, slowly again towards the indulgent. The West is influencing it – Western films, Western novels are influencing it. The West is being influenced by Buddha, by Zen, by Patanjali, by yoga, by meditation, and the East is influenced by Playboy! People are reading Playboy, hiding it inside their Gitas!

You ask, “The West seems to be obsessed with sex.”

It is not true only about the West. The whole of humanity, up to now, has remained obsessed with sex, and it is going to remain so unless we change the whole gestalt. Up to now the gestalt has been repression/indulgence, indulgence/repression, going on moving between these two. We have to stop exactly in the middle. Have you ever tried to stop the pendulum of a clock in the middle? What happens? The clock stops. The time stops.

That’s my effort here. I don’t want you to be indulgent and I don’t want you to be repressive. I would like you to be balanced, just in the middle. It is in the middle that transcendence is possible, and it is in the middle that we can create a humanity which will be neither Eastern nor Western. And it is immensely needed, urgently needed, that a man comes on the earth which is neither Eastern nor Western: a new kind of man with a new vision, freed of all the bondage of the past.

You ask, “Why, in all this time, are people still stuck and unable to move into the Tantric experience of sex, of love and of life?”